19th Sunday Year C
See Commentary on Luke 12:32-48 in Luke 12:22-48
Homily 1 - 2007
Faith is in the air at the moment. Last week the Prime Minister had a meeting with his parliamentarians and concluded that, despite the poor poll results, victory for the party was still possible. “We can do it!” “Trust me!”
Where are you, as you look at the mess the world is currently in? - as you look at the Church, and wonder, Where have all the flowers gone! You hardly have to book your seat to be sure of having somewhere to sit during Mass. Statistical trends are not all that promising.
The Second Reading today from the Letter to the Hebrews provides an encouraging reflection on faith. Perhaps we’re a bit like Abraham – He was told to set out, and start off a whole new nation, with its own homeland for itself - and he didn’t even know where he was going! Start off a nation! and his wife had grown old, and they were childless! Then Isaac and Jacob – sharing their father’s hope that the land where they were – already settled and dotted with fortified cities and towns - would be theirs…. and they were still living in tents, after all those years!
We look at our world, and, like Abraham, we don’t know where we’re heading, and seem to have no plan to get there. There seems to be no next generation likely to carry us into the future… And no one seems interested in the treasures we believe we have
Where do we start? It helps to realise that our situation is not new. In fact, a cursory knowledge of history tells us that the Church’s usual experience seems to be crisis.
We follow a leader who says: Trust me! That’s what Jesus says.
Whatever about the Prime Minister, Can we trust Jesus? Do we trust Jesus? Do we believe him? He said … that the Kingdom of God is near at hand … in fact, he said: It’s among you! At times it can seem that there’s not too much in common between the world and the Church as we see them today and the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God is about a world where people relate to other people from a profound respect for them – a world where other people are brothers and sisters, and not competitors and inevitable threats. Could it happen? Jesus believed it could. Can we, do we, trust him?
The world was just as bad in his day as it is in our day. He didn’t say: Once everyone loves like I do, it will be the Kingdom…. And then, wait for them all to change…. And then, get depressed when they didn’t. He believed that God’s Kingdom was near, so he at least acted accordingly. He treated the people who crossed his path with profound respect, such a respect for their dignity and capacity that he wasn’t frightened to call them to accountability – tough love!
Did it work? It did not look too successful on Good Friday night, or on the Saturday that followed. But Easter Sunday put a whole new complexion on things.
What does he ask us to believe about him? Ultimately, that his way is the only one worth giving a go! It’s not too complicated. He doesn’t expect us to have the answers, to know where we’re heading, to be able to do the impossible (Though what God can do is another matter!) He just asks us to trust him and, like him, simply to treat everyone who comes within our radar with profound respect – to love them.
The PM said: We can do it! When it comes to God’s Kingdom, can we? I don’t think we can - we don’t have to! We entrust the outcomes to God. What chance have we to love people? really to love them? – no exceptions. To do that, and really to believe that love can work, I think we have to let God change us.
Faith is a gift. So, ultimately, is love. If we hang around God, and keep closely in touch with God, God can change us. As the Letter to the Hebrews said: Faith is the guarantee of the realities that at present remain unseen.
Homily 2 - 2010
What’s my sense of God? What is God like?
I think, in today’s Gospel, that Jesus is saying: Be careful! Your sense of God can be too narrow, too mean, too straight-laced. He seems to be saying that God is a God of surprises, a God of unexpected goodness, of outlandish goodness, of disconcerting love: a master who serves up a meal for his servants in the middle of the night for no obvious reason
Jesus urges us to be ready to open the door to this unexpectedly good God, likely to break into our lives at all sorts of ungodly times.
Be ready! Is he talking about when we die? or is he talking about whenever? today? tomorrow? I don’t think it matters much, because, whenever it is, he still wants us to be ready.
What does being ready involve? If we’re thinking of our death, perhaps our first response might be to say “by being in the state of grace”. But what is this “state of grace”? and we might answer: “Not having any mortal sins on our soul.” To me, that’s a miserable answer – that says almost nothing.
Grace? What’s grace? Grace means gift … But what’s the gift, in that case? and who is giving it? The gift that grace is God’s gift of God’s own love. So the “state” of grace is the state of being with, living with, the God who is in love with us, the God who likes us and who even enjoys loving us. But that reality is not just for then, for after our death. It’s now!
How do we get ready for that? How do we keep awake for that? By learning to see and to recognise the disconcertingly loving God, by learning to appreciate the wonder of it all. I think that we shall do that when we die only if we’re learning to do it now, if we’re making the most of every opportunity to see, to appreciate and to truly believe the love around in the atmosphere, and to get drawn into it and to practice it ourselves.
We can learn to see our world and the people in our lives as gifts; as sort of sacraments of God. God is constantly surprising us through them – if only we learn to recognise God there. We can keep learning to love … and that often starts by recognising our so often spontaneous hostility and choosing, delightfully, to ignore it.
What a God! popping up in unexpected places at unexpected times … and loving us in such unexpected ways through so many unexpected people. That God is with us now as we continue with this Eucharist, our weekly chance to say “Thank you” to God – after all, that’s what Eucharist means.
Homily 3 - 2013
It seems to me that the leaders of both major political parties have taken their soundings of the electorate, and are bending over backwards to promise people basically what they think they want. What they disagree on is which of them is most likely to deliver... “Trust me! You can’t trust him!” Inevitably I hear all this incessant political chatter against the background of the Gospels that we have been reflecting on these past couple of weeks.
Two weeks ago there was the prayer taught to us precisely by Jesus: Your kingdom come… Give us each day our daily bread – not too little, not too much, but enough – what we need for each day. That apparently was what Jesus prayed. That is what he wanted. That spelt out his heart desires. It was followed immediately by Jesus’ assurance that, if we learnt our desires from him, and made his prayer our prayer, it would be unthinkable for God not to grant it.
Then last week we had the lucky landholder with the unprecedented, unexpected harvest. What will I do? And his decision was something to the effect that: “I’ll build a world of my own that no one else can share; and I’ll leave all my troubles behind me there; and I know that I’ll find I’ll have peace of mind when I live in a world of my own.” That prompted Jesus crisp reply: Fool!
Fool! It is as though Jesus said: “You don’t find peace of mind when you live in a world of your own. Reach out to people with love, with respect. “Don’t store up treasure for yourself – make yourself rich in the sight of God. Do what you can to make the world resemble ever more fully the Kingdom of God.” Learn from Jesus until you ardently desire, ‘Father, your Kingdom come!
And then today’s Gospel. Whom can you trust? Who is fair dinkum? It is again as though Jesus were saying: “Learn to trust God! God is determined to give you the kingdom. You’ll find peace of mind when you learn to trust God and to take God’s word as Gospel. You certainly don’t need to trust your political leaders. You don’t have to trust yourself. The kingdom experience is not a case of filling up your lives with a mountain of mini-desires, none of which is ever adequate. Down-size! Give alms! Keep enough, and pray for your daily bread. But enough is enough! That is the way to peace of mind, to freedom, to joy, to fulfillment.” As Jesus so quaintly said of himself: He will put on an apron, sit them down at table and wait on them.
We learn what to desire from others. We are all inveterate mimics. But the desires we learn from others are mostly irrelevant – at least as regards a wonderful world where everyone has sufficient for their needs. We need to cut loose from what most others are scrambling over each other to get hold of. We need to learn what to desire by observing Jesus.
But we always need to keep our eyes wide open. Jesus was intent on helping people to become fully alive. He was not into competitiveness or rivalry or one-up-man-ship, but into respect and service and generosity. That was his way – not to build a world of his own where no one else could share, but a world for everyone where the human dignity of everyone would be seen and respected. That was his way to life to the full. That is what he desired – for himself and for everyone. That desire made him vulnerable. All love makes us vulnerable.
We can opt for it honestly only as we learn to trust, not just anyone, but to trust God. When you think of it, what a great desire! What a true treasure! no thieves or moths there! Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also!
Homily 4 - 2019
I was eleven years old, going on twelve, when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The fireball it created was more than five kilometres across. The temperature at its centre was one hundred million degrees. Seventy thousand people were killed immediately or died within hours. The people who were near the centre became nothing. Few of those killed were soldiers. The date was August 6th. On August 9th, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Nagasaki was the one city in Japan with a significant Christian population. By August 15th, the Feast of Mary’s Assumption, the war was ended. As a young lad, I was excited, and thought it all wonderful.
Many years later, as a priest in Warracknabeal, I met an old parishioner who had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese, captured with the fall of Singapore earlier in the war. He was working underground in a coalmine on the outskirts of Nagasaki when the bomb fell. He was unharmed by the explosion. As an old man, he had a wonderful attitude – peaceful, faith-filled and with no obvious bitterness. He was legally blind, but used to walk to Mass by himself every Sunday from his home about a kilometre distant from the church.
I remember another old man, not a parishioner, whom I used to see whenever I visited the hospital in Beaufort, where I was stationed during the early 1970s. He had been a soldier in France during the First World War. In his gruff old way, before I said anything, he would say to me, “Don’t talk to me about God. If you had seen what I had been through, you would never believe in any God.”
Two old men – both had seen terrible suffering. One kept close to God, the other lost faith. How did each picture God? – loved and trusted by one, rejected and denied by the other?
What is God like? Who is God? What is your sense of God? What was Jesus’ sense of God? Does today’s Gospel passage answer questions? Or raise them, and leave the answers hanging?
Is God like the “master” of the first story? Or more like the “master” in the second story? Or is God like both, depending on how we behave? Or like neither? Which master would you prefer God to be like?
Personally, I believe Jesus’ consistent teaching about his Father fits the “master” of the first story, the one who “puts on an apron, sits his slaves down at table, and waits on them”. This is the God who shatters assumptions, and almost seems too good to be true – the God who delights in standing our expectations on their head.
Then what about the “master” in the second story, the one who “cuts off the slave and sends him to the same fate as the unfaithful”, the one who deals out “very many strokes of the lash”? Does this represent the God who rewards and punishes, depending on people’s behaviour – as the story puts it, whether they are “awake when he comes” and “at their employment” or “beating the menservants and the maids, and eating and drinking and getting drunk”?
Does God love us and forgive us unconditionally? or conditionally, depending on our behaviour?
Perhaps our answer will depend on how we hear the second story. Is it about a master who punishes certain behaviours, but punishes judiciously? or is it simply a timely and insightful reflection of life in an unredeemed world where violently abusive behaviour carries its own inbuilt violently abusive outcomes? a bit like Jesus’ comment elsewhere, “Those who live by the sword will perish by the sword”? Violence closes hearts to love – the only too inevitable way of the world, that Hindus and Buddhists have also noted, and in their case refer to as “Karma”.
I believe that the God we come to know depends on the depth of our knowledge of Jesus and the intimacy of our friendship with him.
Homily 5 - 2202
Slavery as such did not exist among the Jews in their own homeland — though, by Jesus’ lifetime, Jewish society was gradually moving in that direction. Slavery was quite common, however, throughout the Roman Empire.
Luke was writing his Gospel for third-generation Christian Jews and converted Gentiles living somewhere within that Roman Empire. They were only too familiar with the practice of slavery, with its cruelty and arbitrariness.
We shall listen to what Luke’s Gospel has for us today. It gave us a series of stories dealing with slave-masters and slaves. The common theme uniting them was initially that of readiness.
The first story dealt with the readiness, the alertness, of a group of slaves waiting for their master to return home late one evening after his attending a wedding feast. The second story dealt with a householder being ready for the constant possibility of burglary — and had nothing to do with slave-masters and slaves.
The Gospel passage then reverted to the original story, with Peter wondering whether Jesus’ parable was intended for the small group of Apostles or for others. The purpose of the stories changed to become ones about the mutual responsibilities of disciples for each other.
Of all those stories, only the first one, the one about the slave-master serving his slaves, holds a surprise — and it is a pleasant surprise. The rest of the stories seem to reflect the “common-enough” cruel practices of the time. They are allegories applied in a heavily moralistic way to a variety of further scenarios — with no surprises at all but rather a wooden application of rewards and punishments.
The first story with the pleasant surprise sits well with my sense of Jesus. I wonder if the following stories tell us more about the moral concerns of the early Christian communities — somewhat disconcerted by what to them was the unexpectedly-delayed return of Jesus to usher in God’s Kingdom.
So let’s look closely at Jesus’ first story, the one “real” parable, about the master returning in the middle of the night from a village wedding-feast, obviously in a good mood, and finding the slaves ready and waiting for him. Jesus’ story has him doing what no slave-master would ever imagine doing. Joyfully he swaps roles: he gets the slaves to sit down and serves them as though he were their slave.
In his parables, Jesus generally wanted to challenge people to let go of their assumptions — in this case, their assumptions about God.
Is that how I spontaneously see God — a joy-filled, smiling God? I think that the older I get, the more I am seeing God in that light. God’s creation of our world and God’s subsequent sustaining of everything in existence are the over-flowing of the joyful creativity resulting from the love of the Persons of the Trinity for each other. Love and God are essentially joy-filled.
In his Last Supper discourse, Jesus prayed that his “joy be in us” and that “our joy be complete”. On that night when he was to give his life “as a ransom for many”, Jesus, the human revelation of the Mystery we call “God”, was apparently still quietly joy-filled with the prospect of serving the world by his redeeming death, the price of his perfect love.
Jesus’ constant joy, sourced from the heart of his Father, is harder for us to admit than we realise; as is the truth that he engages with each of us personally. But as we do begin increasingly to listen to him and simply to believe him, the more wonderful life becomes. Jesus went to the extremity of the cross so that we too might be joyfully convinced of our innate human dignity.